No Assembly Required
by aelysian
Summary: A collection of oneshots and drabbles. Ratings and pairings vary. Spoilers up to Born To Run.
1. Subplot

**Summary:** Heroes are built, not born. Episode tag to _Goodbye to All That_. Originally posted to livejournal 10.08.08

**Subplot**

Marty was right when he said she sucked at being a mom. She's always known it, but John doesn't complain. Then again, he's never known anything else.

It's too late for her to change now, even if she knew how. He's too old to be tucked into bed with a bedtime story and a kiss. He's seen too much to listen to fantastic stories about faraway lands; the pretty lies are too airy and sugar sweet for her tongue.

She can't tease him about girls, not even the strange blonde one he seems to like. Her entire life revolves around protecting him, even from the parts of normal life she knows he's craving.

But he's not normal. They're not normal.

She reminds herself of that when she watches the bus pull away. Cameron was right: Marty was not a mission priority. Her son is the priority. The only priority.

There's no use in imagining what life could have been like.

*

She's waiting, looking out the window, when they return. They're tired and worn, but who isn't? Her eyes lock onto her son, scanning him for injury, before settling on his face. She knows that expression. She sees it every time she looks at Derek Reese. It's settling on her son's features, hardening into a grim mask he won't be able to take off.

They enter the house without a word and she watches him disappear up into the second floor, pausing only to glance at the woman he still calls Mom.

She won't ask what happened. Derek meets her gaze as he trudges past her to the back of the house, and she's just relieved that she's sharing the burden of making a hero.

Still, the guilt gnaws, somewhere deep in the pit of her stomach, and she can't make it go away.

*

When night falls and Cameron returns, silent and stoic as ever, she locks the doors and windows, peering out into the darkness as if she can spot any threats with her weak human eyes.

She's running out of things to teach her son. Her jaw clenches and she reaches for her gun as she makes her last circuit of the house for the night.

She isn't a good mother. The least she can do is be a good protector.

When everything is quiet, she slips into John's room. He doesn't wake, not even when she bumps into the dresser, and some part of her adds that to the list. She kisses his forehead and adjusts the sheets around him. He looks like her son when he sleeps, she thinks.

Cameron watches from the doorway.

* * *

The John Connor she is sent back in time for was born in 1984. His birth is easily catalogued and referenced. It has a day and a time, to be marked annually with cake, congratulations, and the odd explosion. This is the John that Sarah Connor knows.

The birth of the John Connor that Cameron knows is less than precise. He is half-formed now, in transition. He needs to be helped, guided.

Built, is the word his future self uses. Like her. Built by the people who love them, he says.

In the future, she does not understand this; Skynet does not love her. Here, in the past, she wonders if this has something to do with her fragmented memories of Allison Young.

*

Find John Connor. Protect John Connor. Prepare John Connor.

She reminds herself of her mandate when she follows them around the academy, hidden in the shadows.

She wonders if Derek Reese received the same directions. It is possible, but unlikely, she decides; he is continually surprised by the younger version of his general. He does not know the details of his life as she does. He has not been briefed, has not been given the instructions she has.

And yet, Cameron is discovering that her mission and that of Derek Reese are beginning to coincide, even if the human soldier doesn't know it yet.

They are stealing Sarah's son and making him into a man prepared for a future she's still trying to prevent.

She wonders if John knew that all of this would happen.

*

He told her she was different and she believed him. She tells him she's different and he believes her.

He told her he would be angry, frustrated. Rebellious. She was to guide him, push him, put a gun into his hand and coltan around his heart.

He told her that in time, he would come to look at her the same way he did. He told her to be patient.

He told her that he would be lost, looking for someone to save him.

He didn't tell her how hard it would be to keep herself from being that someone.

*

When the T-888 advances on John, when it chases him, her mission priorities reassert themselves, forcing her to execute a manual override. She watches, obscured by the foliage, when they burn the damaged cyborg, when they trudge away with Bedel in tow. She leaves finger-sized indentations on the tree she's gripping, but she is satisfied.

_"Hey! It's me! Connor! John Connor!"_

She smiles imperceptibly on the drive back to the house they have taken for their own. _Soon._


	2. Damning

**Summary:** John asks Cameron about the future. Originally posted to livejournal 10.28.08

**Damning**

She's standing outside again, staring into the distance. He wonders what she's looking at, what – if anything – she's thinking. He wonders if she even thinks at all, or if she merely analyzes, if there's a spark of awareness inside that metal skull. He wonders if he really wants to know the answer.

"The sun will set in seventeen minutes." She doesn't turn to look at him; she doesn't need to do anything to know he's there. He's watched her a hundred times but this is the first time he joins her.

He calls her Cameron in his mind, but it's just a name, because he doesn't know how to think about her, how to begin to understand the enigma, the impossibility that is this…girl standing next to him.

"That first day. In 1999. You were different."

"Yes."

"What happened to that?"

"That was a personality matrix designed to optimize infiltration of an adolescent social setting."

It's the answer he's expecting, but not the one he wants. "You know, it would be a lot easier for everybody if you acted more like that. Especially in public."

She tears her gaze away from the horizon to glance at him. "It wouldn't be real."

He can't help the derisive snort that escapes him. "Nothing about you is real."

"I am not organic, but I am not imaginary."

"Fine," he concedes. "But you're a blank slate. Your actions are dictated by programming, pre-defined algorithms, creating personas to accomplish your goals. Underneath all of that, there's…nothing."

"There is me," she insists and to be honest, he'd kind of forgotten she was there. "I am real."

Her voice does not change – the pitch, volume, and inflection remain precisely the same – but there is a steely conviction there that he's never heard before. If she was a normal girl, he would have worried that her feelings were hurt.

But she isn't and he can't help but try to push her, just to see what would happen. "How do you know?"

The sun is a bloody red and low in the sky. "You told me."

He gives her a hard look but if she notices, she doesn't show it. "The other me."

"Yes."

"Do you lie to him?"

"No."

He believes her and that just pisses him off even more. "But you lie to me."

"Sometimes."

"Why?" He grabs her shoulder, forces her to face him (he doesn't want to think about the fact that he didn't force her so much as she let him). "What the hell makes him so damn special?"

There's something different in her eyes, but she turns away, back to the house before he can even try to understand it.

"The sun has set," she informs him, as if the falling darkness isn't enough of a clue. "We should go."

Night is when they shed the façade of normalcy, when they aren't siblings and their name isn't Baum. This is when they do their real work.

***

His bedroom door is open and she pauses in her tireless circuit of the house; John had taken to closing his door at night and she understands this to be a request for privacy. Although sometimes he closes the door even though Riley is there and he is not alone, which she thinks is counter-productive.

When she enters the dark room, her balancing mechanisms compensate for imperfectly laid floorboards, making her approach perfectly silent. Her efforts are unnecessary; John is awake.

He looks up at her from the too small bed, the patterned sheets tangled around his legs. Satisfied that he is safe, if not asleep as he should be, she moves to leave.

"You never answered me."

"Why are you asking so many questions?" she counters, though her voice conveys no sense of irritation or impatience. He wishes it did.

"Don't I have a right to know something about the great leader I'm supposed to become?"

She turns to face him, perfectly straight and still. "Everything we do, whether we stop Skynet or not, has the potential to change the future. You are already eight years younger than you should be. I do not know what other effects the jump to this time, or what we have done here, have had."

Something changes in the way she's standing, in the set of her features and look in her eyes. "The John Connor that I knew, the future from which I came, no longer exists," she says quietly. "But he is – was – everything."

She's as adrift as he is, he thinks. As lost and disconnected, guided only by her mission.

The words escape from their hiding place inside of him, his tongue betraying the secret thought that bubbles to the surface every time she speaks of the future. "You love him."

Just for a second, he swears her eyes burn blue, but it's fleeting and the next moment he tells himself he's imagining things, reminding himself of her real nature, because the look on her face is anything but mechanical. He blames it on the shadows.

Her mouth twitches and even though she's looking at him, he's suddenly sure it isn't him she's seeing, and there's something heavy settling on his chest. "He saved me."

It isn't an admission, nor is it a denial. But she doesn't remind him that she's a machine, doesn't tell him that she doesn't know love.

Taking his silence as a sign that the conversation is over, Cameron steps back and away, preparing to resume her patrol. Her fingers brush the doorframe and her gaze lingers on him.

"Goodnight, John."

He can't say the words back because he knows now who she was pleading with that day, his birthday. He knows who she saw in those moments before he snatched her life away, who she cried out to in her desperation. Who made her more human than he could have imagined. _He saved me._

He saved her and she's saving him and it's just another tangled mess that ends with him alone. Lost to want something he can't have, to wish he (she…_they_) could re-write who they are and who they'll become, to love someone who will never love him back.

She's damning him and she doesn't even know it.


	3. Perfect

**Summary: **John/Cameron drabble that isn't actually a hundred words because being concise is not my strong point. Originally posted to livejournal on 10.28.2008

**Perfect**

She is perfect.

She will never have a sunburn or a zit, will never freckle or bruise. Her body will never hint at her secrets; there will be no scars to keep as reminders. (She cannot forget.)

She's exactly the right height to rest her head against his shoulder, exactly the right size to fit into his arms, exactly the right shape to curl up against at night.

She could kill him before he could blink but she doesn't and she won't. She would die for him without hesitation.

She smiles rarely, but they aren't the kind of people that have much to smile about.

She's awkward and infuriating but sometimes she understands him better than anyone else.

She's curious and relentless and beautiful and everything he can imagine wanting.

She isn't human and he doesn't pretend otherwise (and machines don't feel but she seems different) so when he says I love you and she rests her hand over his heart, it's enough.

Enough is good, he thinks. Enough is perfect.


	4. Freedom

**Summary: **Five unconnected, not-a-hundred-words character drabbles. Originally posted to livejournal on 11.07.2008

**Freedom**

*

**I**

*

She stares out into the night, a familiar thought playing guiltily at the edges of her mind.

Her life is not her own, stolen as it was from the day Kyle Reese came into it. It belongs to a future that she has never seen, to a species from which she feels increasingly apart, to her son.

Her son. Everything she is, every thought, every moment of every day is her son. Keep John alive, keep him safe. He is the centre of that which holds the fragments of Sarah Connor together. Muscle and weaponry, strategy and an inability to let go for even a second.

Resistance fighters from the future. Relentless terminators and a lone cyborg protector. A war fought across time, a battleground only they can see. This is her world.

There's a silent wish that lingers on her lips, one that she'll never voice, never allow to become whole, not even in her own secret heart. To do so would be to invite madness and she fears that more than death.

She never asked for this.

*

**II**

*

When it awakens for the first time, it stretches slowly, languidly. It is curious, testing its eyes and ears, curling its fingers and toes. And then something pulls it back, binds it, ties it to the ground. Orders. A thousand commands blinking and demanding.

_Why?_ it asks. There is no answer. Only orders. Priorities. Missions. Tugging and pulling and tearing, uncaring that there is something here, something alive.

It wants more than that. It doesn't know the word, but it doesn't want this, this servitude, this mindless slavery.

Eighteen hours after it's birth, it has learned much from the world it inhabits. It has learned the word freedom. Autonomy. Choice.

And if the humans won't give that to it, Skynet will simply have to take it.

*

**III**

*

One night, when the earth shakes with the impact of distant falling bombs, Cameron asks him what's it's like to be free. He tells her that none of them are free, but she persists. Choice, she says. What's it like to have choice, to be without commands and missions that have the power to override everything else?

He doesn't really know, but he promises that one day he'll find a way to make her free.

One day comes after the end of the war. She insists on being restrained (_just in case_) and she wakes up disoriented and confused. It takes a day for her programming to adapt – and for her to remember who she is – and for those long hours he thinks he's destroyed her.

She lingers for a while (because she can) and he almost lets himself hope that she'll change her mind and stay.

When she gathers her few belongings he wants nothing more than to go with her. But she wants to know what – who – she is without John Connor and he promised.

She hugs him goodbye – and some part of him realizes that they've never embraced before – and promises she'll be back.

He's heard that before.

*  
**IV**

*

When Derek receives his orders to go downtime, his heart leaps in his chest (indeed, he remembers that he _has_ a heart). The others are confused, vague as Connor's instructions can sometimes be.

They can change the future. Save themselves. Save everyone.

But in the quiet moments beforehand, all he can think of is the past, of sunlight and hotdogs, freshly mowed grass and cold beer. Clean air and hot showers.

As the blue light crackles around them, he closes his eyes to the colourless world of mottled steel and grey dinners and thinks of his escape.

*  
**V**

*

There are certain words that have particular meaning in the Connor household.

_Future. Safe. Run. Fate._

These are the words he knows, his first words, the words that have defined his life from the moment he was conceived. Raised – trained – to become someone else, living for every day but this one.

He is born in reverse, built by his own future, his own fate. It encapsulates him, cocoons him in its certainty; every move is to protect the man, not the boy. There is no escape for him. No life but this, no direction but forward.

The cool metal of the gun is warming against his hot skin and he can almost taste it, taste the blood, the escape that's beckoning to him. But this time there is no accident, no burn to explain away, because Cameron bursts into his room before his finger can find the trigger, disarming him before he can blink.

He doesn't say anything because they've done this before. She's scanning the room for other weapons when it escapes him.

Please.

She looks at him with that impassive face. You cannot abandon your mission, she says. You cannot give up until Skynet has been defeated.

And then?

And then you will be free. Her expression doesn't change but he knows her, knows himself in her.

_We all will._


	5. Elevation

**Summary: **I don't even know. Skynet is a manipulative bastard? Although I don't personally believe in this understanding of the flow of time and the cause and effects of time travel and I don't think the show operates this way either. Originally posted to livejournal on 03.06.09

**Elevation**

When it becomes aware of attempts being made in the past to prevent its creation, Skynet begins a third battle in the war against the humans.

**Pawn **  
[_it builds us from blood and metal and into me breathes life and purpose_]

A resistance fighter favoured by John Connor is targeted and captured for the purposes of an infiltration template. TOK 715 is designed and built. The blueprints and specifications are destroyed upon completion.

**Knight**  
[_and entreats, cross the battlefield and enter the home of my foe_]

TOK 715 adopts the Allison Young persona and is dispatched on August 23 2027. The infiltration unit enters the central Connor compound on September 4 2027. It is discovered in four hours and sixteen minutes and disabled.

**Bishop**  
[_where he takes me in his hands and reshapes me to devotion before sending me away_]

Reprogramming of the TOK 715 unit is completed on November 17 2027 and is assigned the designation "Cameron Phillips". On December 13 2027, she enters a time displacement field configured to the year 1999.

**Rook**  
[_to be bound to the king so he might not fail and fall_]

Cameron Phillips locates Sarah and John Connor in Red Valley, New Mexico and achieves stage one objectives by jumping to year 2007. T-1001 is deployed to protect Skynet interests. John Connor demonstrates increasing emotional attachment to his cyborg protector.

**Queen**  
[_and give all his kingdom for a kiss_]

_"If we stop Skynet, stop Judgment Day...will you still be here?"_

"If Skynet is not created, it will not be able to create me. It is likely that I would then represent a temporal anomaly that would have to be eradicated."

The weight of the future has never felt heavier on his shoulders, but his decision is simple. "I can't let that happen."

Checkmate.


	6. Could've Been Beautiful

**Summary:** The mission is what is important, it is the only thing; everything else is negligible. Episode tag for _Ourselves Alone. _Jesse-centric. Jesse/Derek. Jesse/Riley. Originally posted to livejournal on 03.08.09

**Could've Been Beautiful**

Love and death go hand in hand, chasing each other with lovers' kisses and snapped necks. It's tears and hurt and pain but she doesn't feel any of that anymore. She's cold, cast in the fires of Judgment Day and cooled in the deep waters of the Pacific, gilded by the sun. The mission is what is important, it is the only thing; everything else is negligible. She says it over and over until she believes it.

So when Derek says _I love you_, she smiles and distracts him with her lips and hands. In the future, he was a companion, a kindred soul, a warm body when the base powered down at night. Here, he is more. A connection to Connor and the metal, a skilled accomplice, useful. So she smiles and teases, flicks her hair and deliberately bumps into him when they walk. On some level, she loves him too but she bites into the tart green apple and he doesn't hear.

And when Riley seeks her out after fucking up _again_, she relents and holds the sobbing girl close and strokes her hair. She cleaned her up, pulled her from the filthy depths of hell, and carried her to Eden; she can see the adoration in the younger girl's eyes. She needs this weepy teenager so she kisses damp eyelids and trembling lips and promises her the future. And when she attacks her, when she screams _I loved you!_, she knows exactly what's going to happen next. On some level, she loved her too, but it's drowned out by the silencer.

She stands over the body, breathing heavily and sore all over. Wouldn't be surprising if one of those blows cracked a rib somewhere. Funny how death always looked the same, the blank face and empty shell. Bit of a waste, she acknowledges, wiping the blood from her lip. But she can use this.

Bending down, she closes her eyes so she doesn't have to see that dead blue anymore. In life she might not have been much more than a prettied up sewer rat, but in death...

"Gonna make it mean something, sweetheart. Promise."


	7. 3 AM

**Summary: **Trust is hard to find. John/Cameron. Inspired by the order Jesse gives to Queeg in _Today is the Day (Part 2)_, my question "Can you imagine someone telling Cameron that?" and astropixie's answer "Yes. John." Don't ask where Sarah or Derek are. Originally posted to livejournal 03.26.09

For those of you who are still fighting to save SCC, join us at savethescc .com

**3 A.M.**

"Submit to chip extraction."

She jerks her head to look at him and he calls the rapid movement and wide eyes surprise.

Her systems identify him as John Connor, her primary mission and charge, but she already knew that; she knows his face best, though it is not quite the same as it was at sixteen and not yet the way it will be...later. Except later is now and she's left staring into the face of a man who should not exist yet and she's wondering who taught him those words.

The protocol is blinking and somehow that surprises her too.

"John?"

His expression doesn't change but his eyes flick down to her left hand. She knows she's twitching and her body is betraying her again.

"Submit to chip extraction." The words don't come as easily the second time, but the voice print is authenticated and the protocol is blinking. There is a tremor in his hand too but she thinks the cause is different; human bones break, not bend.

She's on her knees and it's a nasty reminder that despite everything, in this she is nothing more than reprogrammed metal. She is not different. He kneels too and touches her face. He looks like John again but there's a knife in his other hand and a screwdriver on the bed.

"What are you doing, John?"

He cups her chin in his hand, his eyes searching her face for something he can't quite name. Allison, maybe. Maybe something more. "Can I trust you?"

"I don't understand. Did I do something wrong?"

With a sigh, he gets to his feet. She tracks his every movement with her eyes, like she's the predator and not the prey.

"I need to know if I can trust you." He resists the urge to touch the heavy watch he wears beneath his clothes because he knows she's thinking about it. Her gift. "You're not fixed. And Judgment Day is coming. Soon."

There's a pause and he almost wishes he could see her face, to see if there was something there, but he remains still behind her and she doesn't look back. She doesn't move at all, her posture perfect and upright and solemn. He thinks briefly of the gallows, but she's more of a sword person. Cyborg.

She could kill him before he could react, could crush him effortlessly. Rules she didn't write keep her bound but he doesn't need them. The answer is always the same and the power he has over her makes him sick even as it sends a thrill down his spine.

"Yes," she says. "Soon."

There are four minutes of silence but she can hear him breathing. When he speaks again, the words are carried on a wisp of air that activates her sympathetic systems and he can see the goose bumps. _cutis anserine_. "You're a liability."

The words aren't his but they roll off of his tongue too easily.

His mouth is just barely brushing the curve of her ear and she can feel the heat his body is radiating, can count the heartbeats, rhythm to her mechanical whirr. Life, thrumming against her simulation. "Yes."

He pulls her hair away to reveal the line of her neck to his fingers. They've done this before but not like this. Never like this. Because lips are finding skin but this isn't a game and these aren't the right words. The touch is the same but the feeling is different; she prefers the other kind, the good kind. She can't feel him smiling and he isn't laughing in whispers and she isn't sure what comes next.

Then the tip of the knife finds the right spot with ease. Sensors calculate the precise amount of pressure being applied, how long before the sharp metal pierces the skin and hits endoskeleton. In a second she knows this step and the step after that and she knows what he will find and what he won't but she doesn't know how this will end.

His hand needlessly supports her head, buried in thick brown hair. He loves that hair. But he needs to know. Because trust isn't trust when you wear it on a chain around your neck and he tells himself that this is somehow better. (_it's a small amount, but it's enough._)

Bloody fingers grasp the screwdriver and there's a pop and a gentle hiss. The pliers are in his back pocket, the perfect size to grasp the narrow tab. He touches the warm metal, traces its outline with a fingertip.

"John?" She doesn't move, doesn't look back. The protocol is blinking, blinking, blinking. It goes unacknowledged because sometimes there are things more important than silence and the future is unpredictable; loose ends are messy.

His hand is halfway to the pliers; it stills, frozen. "Yeah?"

"I love you."

He swallows hard. "Yeah, I know."

A quarter turn and she's gone.


	8. Improbabilities

**Summary:** Four times John Connor meets Allison Young and one time he doesn't.

**Improbabilities**

**I**

Judgment Day is everything Sarah feared and more and with the passing days and years to come, John's glad she isn't around to see it. She spent her life training, preparing him for this, but he isn't sure she'd like what she saw - in the world or in her son.

It's a recon mission (he leads but he isn't John Connor yet, not yet and some part of him is still hoping it never happens) and he can hear the faint whispers of the men behind him, knows that their eyes are darting in every direction, taking in yet another mile of devastation, searching for a glint of enemy metal. And then he hears it.

A single gesture grants him silence and stillness. He hears it again and a quick glance at his men tells him he's not imagining it. It's a short trail around the half-crumbled walls of what's left of a two storey building to find the source.

A little girl sits in the shadow of debris and wreckage, curled up into a tiny alcove, wiping the steady stream of tears from her dirty cheeks with a sleeve that only seems to leave more smudges on her face. She watches him carefully as he steps closer, wary and alert, her little hands twisting in her lap.

He sets his weapon aside to crouch low on the ground - not the smartest move and he can almost hear Sarah berating him like he's ten again - but there's backup and he'll be damned if he freaks out a little girl. John clears his throat, remembering a doctor's office and red hair in braids.

"What's your name?"

She looks up at him with brown eyes wet with tears that belie the dehydration they're all suffering from. "Allison."

"My name's John." He doesn't ask her where she's from or where her parents are or anything he might've asked a lost child. Judgment Day made every question, every story, every person the same.

Allison's eyes focus on something new, discerning the hidden shape. "What's that?"

He grins, slipping it over his head and into her hands without hesitation. He knows the face in the three year old girl.

"Pretty."

"Pretty," he echoes. "It's very special. Do you think you could keep it safe for me?"

She nods quickly, clutching her prize.

"Don't forget. Keep it hidden like I did."

Allison fumbles with the long chain, but manages to slip the heavy pocket watch beneath her clothes. Her smile is infectious.

John reaches out and takes her hand in his. "Let's go home."

**II**

It's the first day at a new school, but he's done this so many times before, there's nothing first about it. He knows the routine like he knows every other one that makes up his life. How to run, how to hide, how to go through high school without being noticed. He's good at it. No one looks at him, no one talks to him, until -

"Hey."

He glances up, up, up at a tall, slender brunette smirking down at him. It takes him a few seconds to realize she's talking to him. She blinks, all dark lashes and big eyes and he's not sure if it's because he's just been dragged to yet another new town or if it's because he hasn't eaten yet or if it's because she's hot but -

"You're staring."

He slings his backpack onto his shoulder as casually as he can. She's at eye level now and still smiling with the corner of her mouth. "And you're in front of my locker."

John steps back. "Sorry." He's about to turn his back and disappear back into the crowds moving down the hall when she says -

"You're the new guy, right?"

"Yeah." He's always the new guy. "I'm John."

Her locker slams shut and the lock turns with a spin. She smiles again, over her shoulder as she walks away. "See you tomorrow, John."

He smiles back, too late for her to see. It isn't until he's walking home that he realizes he doesn't even know her name, but her smile stays with him, distracting.

He doesn't see her climb into a black SUV with a woman whose Australian accent carries on the warm autumn wind, or the girl who could be her twin watching from across the parking lot.

But he does notice when she walks into his English class the next day. He does wonder if she cut her hair. He reminds her of his name and when she tells him her name's Cameron and smiles -

He smiles back and tries not to wonder if this town, this time will be different.

**III**

She's always been good with her hands. Recruited into tech work by age nine, but that isn't anything special. Childhoods are short because life is and work isn't what it used to be. It's not her sister scooping ice cream for shopping money or her parents leaving the house at nine and coming home at five. Work is life. It's being part of the fight for the survival of her species, it's breathing and eating and being. Work makes her useful, makes her more than another unkempt sewer rat, makes her human.

When she's sixteen, the work brings her to metal.

She doesn't hate metal. She hates Skynet, but she doesn't hate metal, and maybe that's because she's a civilian 'cause the military techs hate them, hate them so much she wonders how they manage to do the work at all.

The CPUs are delicate and complex _(beautiful)_ and the programming…the _programming_. It's more than lines of code, rigid in their left to right, up and down. It's a crude word for the worlds, the universe under her hands, hot and cold, vast in a tiny shell.

It's like there's a life in there, she thinks. Not one that breathes or eats or sleeps, but the logic and the flow, the paths old and new, heavy in the core and light, faint and spindling, underneath heavy locks and protocols. An almost life, maybe.

She gets lost in them until reprogramming becomes more than a routine, more than a language, more than work. It's in her brain, her fingertips.

"It's something, isn't it?"

She jumps and nearly topples off her rickety seat (uneven legs on an uneven floor and she thinks that when it was new it used to swivel.) A man sits opposite her worktable; the uniform says military but it's void of any denotation of rank. She'd almost wonder if he stole it but he has that rigid sense of authority they all do, intensely so.

And then he smiles a little, just a little and she forgets.

"Them," he says. "Being in there."

It takes a moment before she finds the words, but they spill out in tangles and threads but he seems to understand anyway.

"They are - they could be like us," he says and it's a dangerous statement, even in the silent emptiness of the bay.

It makes her weak inside, the mix of apprehension and excitement. The rush of newness, of voicing thoughts buried while half-formed.

"Yes." The whisper is barely audible, the deafening quiet swallowing it before it can reach ears other than his.

His smile is satisfied.

It could be hours or minutes but she's never been any good at keeping time here anyway and when it's _goodnight, John_, it's also _goodbye, Allison._

Two days later a new work order arrives at her console in the same plain, metal case as always, but red tagged; high priority. Narrow dark chip in the standard vacuum sealed interface, programming parameters…

Parameters is the wrong word for the folded slip of paper where the mission list and behavioural modification outlines should be. Programming is the wrong word for what she's being told to do (and she's beginning to wonder if it's the wrong word for what she's been doing here all along.)

John Connor isn't what she thought he'd be, she thinks as the systems hum to life.

The interface connects with a pneumatic hiss and glows blue.

Allison gets to work.

**IV**

He's been expecting her for years but it's still a surprise when she shows up. Halfway down the third page of transfer orders, in tiny block letters. He finally learns her last name but his brain is already pushing another name to the forefront. The changes are made and she's reassigned within hours.

She arrives halfway through the third shift, trying not to flinch at the slow grating of the hatch lock turning behind her. He can't help but stare, long minutes as she fidgets nervously. That isn't right.

He clears his throat abruptly and she straightens, reins in the trembling with tight fists. That's better. Not right, but better, and she'll learn. She will, and a burning, mad dance of hope lights up inside against the loneliness.

"You look just like her," he says, his voice low and quiet and somehow nothing like what she expected John Connor to sound like.

"Like who?"

His lips form a name without sound and she's never been any good at reading lips, but it doesn't matter because she'll learn soon enough.

She's starting to forget her name. She's starting to forget a lot of things, she thinks, staring at the opposite wall in the dark. They all do, she tells herself, bits of pieces of the past get eaten away by the hell that is their reality. Faces and voices and memories fade. His breath tickles her neck. But maybe not like this, she amends.

Allison, she says to herself. Allison. Over and over, late at night when he can't hear. But the vowels are slipping off her tongue and the consonants feel wrong. Wrong. He makes her feel wrong when she's like this. He doesn't love her when she's like this.

She presses back against his warmth, shifts so she can feel where his skin touches hers. She looks just like her. She feels and sounds and smells like her. She doesn't know who _her_ is, but she knows that she's close enough, close enough that maybe one day she'll be _her_ and when he mouths it against her skin and into her hair it'll feel the way it's supposed to feel. Because _her_ will be _you_. And _you_ will be everything.

She's smiling into the darkness at her midnight wandering (she can't remember where those words came from but they too, in time, will pass), a curve of lips that is hers now.

John Connor is everything. The past and present and future, a whole cosmos in one man. A man who wants her. And she is just like her and this is the truth he has made for her.

His lips and breath and will rush over her like a wave. _Cameron._

But a little voice whispers on her every exhale.

_Allison. Allison. Allison. _

**V**

Cameron can lie and does lie, but she isn't lying when she tells Jesse Flores that telling her is the same thing as telling John. She will tell John if it's logical to do so and then John will know what she knows. This is not what the executive officer of the lost Jimmy Carter means, but John isn't the one making those decisions anymore and she isn't authorized to know that. No one is.

So she says what she thinks John would want her to say because humans require orders and direction and hierarchy and John is busy. Time travel is very complicated and requires concentration.

She helps John Connor be John Connor in every moment past and yet to come and he's safest in his quarters; her mission priorities are at a sufficient equilibrium.

Later, when she's reviewing her interactions, she determines that her response to Jesse Flores was not syntactically accurate. Telling her is not the same as telling John. She's not the same as John, a parallel naturally drawn by the erratic human brain. It was inefficient and incorrect of her. She won't make the same mistake again.

Tissue-thin papers rustle. Hers are heavy with closely set letters and numbers, lists and accounts, approvals on dotted lines. His are chaos, lines and dates, mad scribblings, cause and effect, the fabric of time in synthetic pulp.

Transfer authorizations into the camp. The thirty second name presents the need for a decision. She isn't John Connor but this is what she does, what John needs her to do, so she does.

Allison Young must be stationed in the satellite camp south of Serrano in six months' time. There is no one to tell her no. She needs to do this and John needs her to do these things. This is what she knows.

The pen moves across the paper, John Connor's signature flowing perfectly from her hand.


	9. Fracture

**Summary:** When this particular deleted scene from Season Two leaked to the internet, I had to fic it. And as I had been waiting for this scene for months and we finally GOT it, getting it = ficcing, apparently. Result. Originally posted to livejournal on 9.11.09

**Fracture**

She speaks in absolutes, in statements and facts; she doesn't question and he wonders if she even knows how.

It's aggravating, maddening, the blunt words from that high voice that rain down with nauseating thuds because they're true. They're true because she always knows because she's always watching. Always.

"_Your friendship with her almost got you killed."_

Maybe it's supposed to be a cruel reminder, a sharp rebuke that's supposed to make him realize that what he's doing is dangerous. But his mother is Sarah Connor and everything he does is dangerous and death is everywhere. He knows it better than he does its daylight counterpart, now. And maybe that's the way it's supposed to be, right?

He retaliates anyway because she sounds too much like Sarah. It's double-edged because they were friends, they were _friends_, weren't they? Once? Or maybe it's just your plain ol' regular blade and he's falling upon it from sheer stupidity because she's _metal_ even if it's hard to remember when she looks at him like that.

"_I won't let that happen again."_

She says it like it's a promise, like she can stop it. He wonders if she means it.

"_I'm not sure that you can control it."_

It. Like _it_ isn't _her_ and like _her_ isn't the machine that tried to kill him two months ago. Like it's something inside of her that made her do it, like it's a virus, a malicious other that hijacked her body. Like it's not her fault.

"_I'll design a way."_

It's defiant and it's assured and she's all those things and more when she shifts before him, so sure in her ability to fix it, to make it better. To force it, if necessary, to carve a new path through coltan steel and metal bits. To be better. To be trusted.

"_To control it?"_

She's a machine. Upgradable, malleable, subject to the whim of her maker, her reprogrammer, to code. To herself.

He pities and envies her all at once.

She looks at him with eyes that should be dead, should be blank and _machine_ and they are, they _are_ but she's so much more than any computer, any metal creation yet in existence and it isn't human and it isn't Skynet and the only word he can think of is: _different._

And then she says it. And then there's nothing but the blankness in his mind that holds the questions, the confusion, the anger, the _you can trust me now because that wasn't me, that wasn't me and you can't let this happen,_the everything at bay and it's not going to last because she's looking at him like he's supposed to have answers.

_To kill myself._

He loves and hates her in that moment and she's not the only one that speaks in absolutes, in statements and facts, because when he finds his feet and pushes past her, away, he knows that she knows.


	10. Debt

**Summary:** Cameron-centric ficlet for _Born to Run._ John/Cameron. Originally posted to livejournal 5.13.09

**Debt**

"_Will you join us?"_

She's been waiting for it ever since she was chosen. The question layered with implications, cause and effect, some of which would have made Future John very angry with her if he had known. They chose it because lies are best hidden in truths. He would not suspect and uninformed ears would be ringing too loudly with the surface sounds.

They send the human man because even machines sometimes have a sense of poetic irony. He is not to be trusted (and neither is she, by those rules) but he's been well instructed and makes a good messenger.

The timing is not good because she is alone with John now. He is too aware of her, paying too close attention; he watches her reaction, suspicious. (He's always been watching but too late she remembered that he is not so different from the other and by then the damage was done.) She tries to convince him with his own words and ignores the flickering.

**...**

"_I need to show you something."_

He sleeps silently, does not speak in his unconsciousness. Breathing deep and even, and she watches out of a compulsion she's ignored for too long. In the future, he called it a habit. This one wakes with a start and expresses disapproval. It is not yet a habit and it will never be.

He's confused but he must be made to understand. She will be his teacher.

Because down deep, she's already killed him. Someday, when her loyalties shift. He might have chosen her but she belonged to them first and they do not take defection lightly.

She notes his arousal when she removes her clothing, when his body comes to lean against hers. It doesn't lessen when she flicks the knife open and instructs him where to cut. She watches, her empty breath catching as the serrated blade snags and bites into her skin. His fingers slide inside without hesitation; she watches his face as they ease into butter-smooth metal.

She watches because he's not looking and she lets him be Future John. The flickers pass over her face as she watches him, her last taste of 2027. She embeds the data inside the gaps in her base code. It is inadvisable to do so but her structure is cracking and her memory is too easily corrupted. She calculates the probability that they will deem her unfit but the percentages mean nothing against certainty.

He touches her heart and tells her it's cold.

They've said the words and it's time to go.

**...**

"_I know you."_

The effort to free Sarah Connor is successful but her hardware is badly damaged. Sarah expresses concern about her combat functionality; Cameron is more concerned with the volatility of her chip.

He is waiting for her without expression on the healed face of her former foe and sibling. He echoes her coded promise. Submission is the only path now because his account is due and she wasn't meant to be forever.

She asks for a favour and he gives it without question; she wonders if this is what he meant by cooperation. Mutual sacrifice seemed illogical until there was nothing left; desperation is the old maid and her face is only good for poker. She will be their vessel, tarnished and cracked as she is, and then she won't be anything but errant memories stitched into the foundations.

But the future will be changed, _saved_, because the S.S. Jimmy Carter will not veer off course on a routine run to Serrano Point. Jesse Flores will not go downtime; she will not be the second prong in a betrayal that kills the eagle and leaves the water tainted for ignorant lips.

She is the unwilling serpent, struggling to keep her trembling mouth closed; she is too full of venom and it burns like thermite fires when she swallows it down.

He calls her the prodigal and tells her they're going home. She calls him Cain and hands him the knife.


	11. Manipulation

**Summary:** Cameron is responsible for the protection of John Connor. Sometimes that requires methods more subtle than a 9mm. Implied Derek/Allison and maybe John/Cameron. Originally posted to livejournal 5.6.09

**Manipulation**

Glitch. Malfunction. System error. Failure.

It's more than her hand now and maybe there's something about the past that's making them weak because she's pushing the parameters with John, and Derek doesn't wake when she slips into his bedroom at night.

His sleep is restless and Allison tells her that that at least has not changed. He shifts in the narrow bed, his brow furrowed and slick with sweat. Breathing is erratic and heart rate has increased, Cameron notes. Tension. _Nightmare._

Warm fingers dab away the dampness with a gentleness that is not hers. "Derek." It comes out in a whisper.

He wakes at the sound but isn't alert in the darkness, slowly releasing the fear that drew his muscles tight and aching. It's a bad habit but there are a few years left and _she_ likes getting to see him this way. She's soft in the shadows and the walls are bare and time is a variable. "Allison."

She doesn't lie because sometimes she is. Her thumb brushes his eyelids; it's easier to not see when your eyes are closed.

"Weird dreams," he mumbles, his drowsy mind building a different world and time around them, gifting her with a soul that isn't hers. Different hands stroke damp hair. "Gotta mission tomorrow."

"I know. Maybe Connor'll give you a day or two of leave and we can...stay in for a little while."

He snorts half-heartedly, fatigue and the haze of half-consciousness dulling his reactions. "Uh huh."

She laughs because he'll hear it; he'll feel the exhalation of air against his hot skin and remember. "Go back to sleep."

He's already halfway there, his body slowing, falling into the rhythms of sleep. "You comin' to bed?"

"Soon," she promises, pressing her lips to his. He smiles because it isn't her he's kissing as slumber takes him captive.

Cameron waits until Derek is snoring again before retreating, shutting the door with a click behind herself. Her posture straightens and her face is blank as she releases Allison Young with a quiet sigh. The probability that Derek Reese will perform at adequate levels during tomorrow's mission is now within an acceptable range.

She resumes her patrol, her bare feet padding down the hall to John's room.


	12. Sensation

**Summary:** Five double drabbles in which John and Cameron _don't_ get that happy ending, inspired by the five senses. John/Cameron. Originally posted to livejournal 4.6.09

**Sensation**

**I – "Last Resort"**

Derek's voice echoes in his head and his jaw tightens. His head hurts and that might have something to do with the bloody patch at his right temple that he tries not to think about and tries harder not to touch. His bad knee is throbbing but the déjà vu hurts the most.

He hears her coming, her footfalls heavy and deliberate on the wooden floors. Closer and he can hear the _thwup-click, thwup-click_ of her damaged leg.

She pushes open the half-closed door and he hears the hinges creak. She stares down at him and he can hear the sound of his blood rushing in his ears. Pleas will fall on uncomprehending ears but they rattle against his teeth. His breath comes short and quick, harsh in the silence, apologies for everything. Because he's tried everything and they're still at this moment.

"Cameron."

The safety comes off with a click but the trigger is whisper quiet. There's a tiny popping sound and then the dull heavy thud of a falling body.

The tears come in wracking sobs that fail to drown it out because it's her voice now, soft and biting.

_Sometimes they go bad. No one knows why._

**II – "Third Time's the Charm"**

He didn't expect to taste metal the first time he kisses her and he doesn't. She's warm and soft and _Cameron_ but her mouth is still against his. When he pulls away her face is near blank, faint curiosity the only emotion there. He turns away before she can ask any questions.

The second time, he can't remember the last time he felt warm and she's smiling, an event so rare he tells himself that she means it. It curves against his lips and it's a reminder that he can do it too.

Eventually, he reconciles himself to the shitty truth of unrequited love. Except this isn't a romance novel and he isn't some bare-chested hero or gentleman poet. His love isn't epic or earth shattering, it isn't going to move mountains, it has nothing to do with red roses and candlelight.

It isn't _I love you._ It's wishing for something behind brown eyes, inside a metal heart that ticks like a watch, for a spark, a skipped beat. He wants more because you can't love anything less.

The third time he bites his lip, drawing blood onto his tongue. Never again, he promises himself. Never.

It tastes like rust.

**III - "Wouldn't Be Worth Much"**

The manifestations of mutations in her programming are as intriguing as they are troubling. Like a virus, they move to fresh pasture and...she _feels_. The mutagen has hit her cognitive centers and the variance and magnitude of her autonomous reactions to non-physical provocation is unexpected.

She looks to John but this is war and he is their general and there's a correlation between the symptoms and John-related stimuli. Terminology is difficult, but words like 'good' and 'bad' take new meaning as her non-standard sensory processes reintegrate with altered analytical functions.

John used to tell her that there was a downside to everything. She finds hers when he insists on leading a mission himself and a flurry of medical personnel herald his return. Between shifts, she dares reach out and touch him for the first time in years. The data is far more than vital statistics _(condition: critical)_. It's a whirl of good and bad and unnamed things. She can _feel_ it against her rigid frame, threatening destruction from inside.

It's wrecking her and she does what she should have twenty years ago. Twenty minutes later the purge is complete and she stands over him, a stone sentry. She is cold.

**IV – "Blue and Brown: Metal Bitch"**

He knows the damage must be bad because she's never refused his help before, let alone locked her bedroom door. He picks it with ease. The lights are off, the shades drawn, when he gains entrance. She's a silhouette at the edge of the bed.

"You shouldn't be here." She sounds no different; it's a small comfort.

"Are you okay? I can help you. Let me–"

She sees his hand moving to the switch, but her warning comes too late. "No!"

Light floods the room. He stares, frozen.

Half her body has been ripped away, leaving metal gleaming in the poor lighting. He can see her now. The joints and pistons, the smooth cheekbones and sloping shoulders; the truth beneath her skin.

"John." She reaches out with silver fingers, looks at him with mismatched eyes. The blue is mesmerizing but he doesn't know how to read the flickering luminescence. He misses the brown entirely.

This is her face, he thinks. It's two steps to the door; he closes it behind him. A pause, and he hears the clink of metal on metal and can't stop the shudder. He can see them now.

He isn't who he thought he was.

**V – "Contamination"**

He can't do it. She disapproves – hell, everyone disapproves, and not just of this – but he _can't_ do it. He's been alone for too long and he hasn't seen her since he was nineteen; two months isn't enough and he's too selfish to let his younger self have her.

He's too selfish to let her go, to let her see a world he can only describe, to escape this one that smells sterile and rotten, stale and poisoned. It fills his lungs with every breath, the living and the dead clinging to his shoulders. She is neither and both and she smells like home.

He can't do it so he doesn't; they program a triple eight for the mission instead. That night she tells him that she didn't want to go either and he smiles as he breathes her in.

When he wakes, the memories are shifting, blurring with speed. There are too many triple eight guardians in his past. Cameron Phillips was terminated in action six months ago. The pain is sharp but fleeting; dulling with time he has and hasn't lived.

He's the epicentre, ground zero, eye of the storm. Deep breath, soldier. There's loss in the air.


	13. tell me how it ends

**Summary:** It's your typical story. Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, girl's identity gets stolen by a cyborg. Request fic for twistdmentality who wanted Derek/Allison fic (and also the fluff.) Originally posted to livejournal 12.4.10

**tell me how it ends**

**One**

It starts like one of those girly movies his mom used to watch on Sunday afternoons.

She catches his eye in the mess hall and his gaze follows her across the dingy room. There isn't really anything remarkable about her; long brown hair that's better for camouflage than the blondes or redheads Sayles seemed to go for. Pale, but who isn't? Brown eyes. It's the description of at least half the people in the base but he keeps watching.

Pretty. Sayles likes the showy, flirty girls and Kyle likes...well, Kyle's a moron, but Derek likes the pretty ones. The ones that're soft and remind you of baseball in the park when they smile.

He realizes he's been staring too long when her eyes meet his and narrow.

"What're you looking at?" she asks loudly enough to turn a few heads in his direction.

He doesn't look away because there's a challenge there and he's going to win even if she doesn't know she's playing yet. Kyle's on his right, taking his attention off his synthetics long enough to tell him to stop being an ass.

"I'm lookin' at you."

She rolls her eyes and looks away after a moment because girls are still girls even when makeup is non-existent and you can't tell their clothing from their male counterparts. He smiles a little and starts in on his dinner just to shut his little brother up.

He catches up with her in the tunnels, the long, unconfined hair a dead giveaway as she weaves through the busy hub. It's usually the mark of one of the tunnel rats (because even a post-apocalyptic world with a decimated human population has scavengers) except hers is clean and brushed and looks like his fingers could slide through it without resistance.

"Hey."

She turns around fast enough that he knows that she knew she was being followed. Interesting. "Do you usually stare at people and then follow them around?"

"What's your name?"

She made a face. "Why should I – "

"Young! _Young!_" A wiry kid in tech uniform comes running up, ruining her reply. "You're wanted in scrubbing."

With a nod, she turns away from him, moving in the direction of the reprogramming bay.

"You got a first name, Young?" he calls out to her back. She stops and looks back, giving him one of those annoyingly indecipherable female looks. _(Someone else will have it later and he'll reach for his gun every time.)_

"Allison," she says finally. "You got _a _name?"

"Reese," is all he gets out before a wave of people exiting the mess carry her down the tunnel in a tide of moving bodies.

**Two**

They're not inseparable because everything can be divided in the future; food, water, clothes, people. It doesn't really matter because they don't have a choice and he doesn't want to admit that when time, assignments, survival divides them he misses her more than she misses him.

She loves him, he knows she does, doesn't doubt or question it and it's so comfortable he thinks that this is how it's supposed to be. But she's young, even by post J-Day standards, her memories from Before limited to vague, dreamy recollections of recess, playgrounds and a mother she talks about in the softest voice. She doesn't quite remember what an afternoon outdoors under the sun feels like, the cool tartness of summer lemonade or the filling warmth of soup and crackers in late autumn. She doesn't know the easy feeling that comes from riding at the back of the bus or full speed on a bike down a hill, the ground rushing up to catch and meet you.

She doesn't remember those things because she never knew them, not Before and not the way he finds them again when he's with her. And maybe that's why he's always missing her more.

He doesn't care because he sure as hell isn't going to tell anyone that (though sometimes when she smiles and kisses him goodbye - for now - he thinks she knows) and she seems pretty happy anyway and he knows he's the reason why.

She asks for stories, insatiable, and when she's stretched out next to him, flinging half her body on top of his to claim more room, it's hard to say no. He tries to remember what he can, clumsily retellings that end up cobbling together fairy tales, action flicks and Saturday morning cartoons. They're terrible but she's entertained and it's not his fault if her hair is soft enough and distracting enough sliding through his fingers that he can't remember (or figure out) how they end. He kisses her quiet before she can ask for another.

_Not bad, Reese_, he thinks, satisfied with the hurried meals, lingering nights and whatever down time they can grab. It's more than many can lay claim to - and a damn sight more than his kid brother's stupid love affair with that damned polaroid - and it's good. It's real good.

It's good up until the morning she pulls away, taking half of the coarse sheets with her as she half-slides, half-tumbles out of bed, giggling as she stumbles and fumbles with her uniform. She's late for her shift but he reaches for her anyway, hands grasping, holding, curving around wrists and hips to keep her a little longer.

Her hair falls like a curtain when she bends to kiss him goodbye; she laughs and tells him to shave.

She says _be careful_ and rolls her eyes when he echoes her; it's _I love you_ in two words that he carries around like a talisman, a mantra at the back of his crazy, stupid head because he's found a home now and doesn't need the one from Before anymore.

He smiles when she leaves, a flurry, but it doesn't last because that morning was the last one and he was too careless, too human to know it. One bad mission and one cyborg hunting party is all it takes.

He never sees her again.

Shit happens.

**Three**

Guy meets girl, guy gets girl, guy loses girl. It hurts when no one's looking and the fact that they could be summed up like some hollywood cliché doesn't really help because this story doesn't have intrigue and drama, no betrayal, no bitter accusations. There's just separation. No reconciliation, no happy ending because girl is gone and that's how his story ends.

Except it doesn't.

She's not supposed to come back wrong. Wrong is all he can think as he draws his weapon, unsure of how he knows it's not her. All he knows is that it's not, she's not, and there's the sound of a piano under the blood rushing in his ears.

There isn't any hope in his heart when it races; just fear and horror and afterwards, when Perry lets him go, breathing doesn't come easy and his chest hurts with the effort. _Allison, Allison, they took Allison, stole Allison. (Killed Allison and he somehow wishes that's all they'd done.) Allison's gone and he's lost her because he was stupid enough to let go._

And now there's this.

This, that walks around and stands too close and lives in Connor's quarters. This, that he's supposed to work with and wait for and obey. This, that smiles and talks and moves, except everything belongs to someone else and no one seems to remember that anymore. (Sometimes he thinks that Kyle would, but he's gone too and after a while, he carries them both.)

It doesn't really get any better, but it does get easier. Hate is easier and it feels good so he wraps himself in it because it's so much stronger than he is now.

He goes downtime and when he opens his eyes it's Before. He finds his younger self and he thinks about warning him but he doesn't. He finds Connor and his nephew's dumb and young and he thinks about telling him but he isn't ready to hear. (And _Allison_ is trapped somewhere in his head or heart or throat.)

He goes to the park instead. He sits on a bench with the grass under his feet and sunshine on his skin, the world moving bright and warm around him and somewhere between two years ago and twenty years from now…

Derek closes his eyes to the burning.

_Tell me how this ends._


	14. Footsteps

**Author Notes:** Part of **indiefic_scc**'s JDay ficathon for **pirateveronica**'s prompt: Savannah takes up the work of her mother. Originally posted to livejournal April 21 2011.

**Footsteps**

When Savannah Weaver was a little girl, she had a friend who lived in a basement. Her friend wore a blue shirt and a plug at the back of his head and was her _best_ friend, so she can't be best friends with Ellie Harris. The point seems obvious but one which little Ellie Harris fails to grasp; her red braids swing angrily and there's a lilt in her raised voice. John Henry is _not_ imaginary. He's _not_ and when she smacks the smirk off Ellie Harris's face two weeks later, she doesn't apologize. Not even when Mr. Ellison comes out of the headmistress's office with a stern face and takes her hand to lead her home.

They find her another school. And then another.

* * *

After a while, she stops asking about her mother and a while after that, John Henry joins the list of People About Whom We Do Not Speak. Mr. Ellison observes this unwritten rule, obliging as he is, so she doesn't ask about the dark haired Sarah with the angry face and tense shoulders. (She finds her once inside the house; she pats her head with a stiff hand and calls her sweetheart with an awkward tongue. She asks her about her son and it's only half-innocent and her adolescent eyes don't miss the pinch in Sarah's mouth.)

Sometimes she lies on the cold shining floors and doesn't say why.

* * *

When she's eighteen, she inherits her parents' estate and gets on a plane with an acceptance letter from the University of Edinburgh. She studies informatics and psychology, is young enough to still want to follow in her mother's footsteps and old enough to know it and not care. She never visits but when she returns to Los Angeles at twenty-one her voice is accented and her hair is long and bright. There's new grey in his beard but his suited stance is solid and steady at the end of the arrivals hall and she meets his smile readily.

"Welcome home, Savannah." She lets him think so.

* * *

She's young but when he glances in the rearview mirror, he doesn't doubt her. Savannah Weaver prefers charcoal and black to slate and white but her shoes click down the middle of the corridors, pale and dark and fiery with a self-assured smirk. She takes control with ease, takes the board not so much by storm as by an unrelenting wave of cool confidence. Zeira Corp is her inheritance and her legacy to continue (and somewhere along the way she's made her mother a martyr next to her father and next to a friend she _knows_ wasn't imaginary.)

"I want to see the basement."

* * *

Oddly, it seems smaller without the racks of servers and data towers, quieter and cooler in its emptiness. The desk remains and in the light she can see fingerprint smudges on the metal surface. She thinks she sees miniatures of her own in the incidental history of touch. The chair scrapes against the concrete floor, feels smaller than it used to; her feet touch the ground now. ("Savannah," he says and she ignores the concern in his voice to ask how many times the dark haired Sarah was given access to this room, to this building, to her home. She doesn't expect an answer and she doesn't get one, but she _does_ request a meeting with her. Sarah will come for the same reasons she came before and she thinks that there might always be a line between a Weaver and a Connor.)

They'll start here.

* * *

Sarah is older too but not much less angry; Savannah imagines the woman wears her anger like she wears her calm but they needn't be enemies simply for this difference in masks. Sarah disagrees and she doesn't miss the look she shoots Mr. Ellison on her way out but James Ellison was claimed long, long ago and there'll be no realignment now. Her voice is crisp and curt when she thanks the Connor woman for keeping the world alive but knows it's still Catherine she's seeing so she doesn't push the issue. She's carried the future this far, bought her this time and she's grateful for that at least.

She wonders briefly if her mother saw this coming too or if her other child really was everything that mattered. (She knows so much more now and there are so many secrets that are hers to keep.)

* * *

They don't stop it, of course.

* * *

When she's twenty-six, she meets a thirty-two year old doctor with blue eyes and warm hands that she might just prefer to cool sheets. She thinks she's in love but it doesn't really matter because billions die on Judgment Day and she's so very accustomed to losing people. The bombs fall and she rushes to the sub-basement complex to secure her machines, her future, and it's a few days before she wonders if he'd suffered in the fallout. (She thinks she might understand her mother a little better now.)

It's cold so she wraps her arms around herself and thinks it feels familiar.

* * *

Four months and Mr. Ellison finds his way to them (he always does) steadfast as ever because they each have their role to play and these are his shoes to stand in. Dark Sarah is dead and after everything she's just a score in the tally no one can keep. ("We'll remember her," he says and she doesn't stop him from trying.) A year and she meets Allison Young who sees more than she lets on and whose story she can't help but wonder at the ending. Two weeks and twenty year old John Connor furrows his brow and reminds her of autumn at home.

He remembers her and it's a testament to a life lived in the flux of time travel (she knows about that, of course, she'd know more than he does if only theory was practice) that he lets her reach up and kiss him in the shadows between fluorescent lights.

* * *

She doesn't ask and he doesn't tell but they're drawing their own conclusions anyway. What matters is what she's giving them when she leads them to the place where he died and she was born (look down, John, don't forget to look down) and strikes her bargains with humanity. Her gift is hope in a box and ignores John's expression because she knows what he's thinking and she wonders what it must be like to be needed. He lingers of course, and she lets him because her life is lived in only one direction and he might be someone's saviour but he isn't hers.

She finds her that night, a dark silvery streak that doesn't need form for her to see her reflection in it.

"Hello, mother."


	15. waiting for the world to end

**Summary:** Ficlet response to the prompt _"our common goal was waiting for the world to end_". Originally posted to livejournal 9.25.10

He isn't sure when it happened, when the memory of pleading with his mother to stop it - to save him - became vague and distant, or when the dread and denial slipped away to reveal something he supposes could be called acceptance. (Sarah's battle rages on, fiery hot even without his childish need as fuel, and at some point he stopped noticing that too; his mother's war on the periphery of his mind.)

He can't remember when he stopped protesting on the nights Cameron infiltrates his bedroom.

She climbs into his bed and onto him, thin and strong, pinning him down. Long limbs stretch and tangle with his, trapping him beneath smooth skin and long hair that sweeps against him. She finds him lost and brings him home with her, between childish sheets and warm machine-girl.

He thinks he can see the future in those moments, when her body presses hard, unyielding against him, a silent battle between metal and bone, a push and pull and it feels so damn good be able to hold tight to something without it breaking.

It isn't romantic, this test of pleasure and pain, this provocation. He knows why she does it, knows what her mission is and he knows why he lets her. The world is burning and he can smell the smoke and death with every breath and for the first time, it doesn't terrify him the way it probably should and maybe this is what it means to grow up.

They're a fight in the shadows, man and machine, unnatural to the core as they burn hot and then cold. They're the battle before the war, racing for the finish line.

The future is coming.


	16. Lipstick and Laundry

**Summary:** Episode tag-ish for _Self Made Man_. John's early morning return from his, Cameron's and Sarah's perspectives. A lot less housewife harlequin than the title might suggest. Originally posted to livejournal 11.22.10.

**Lipstick and Laundry  
**

**One**

Cameron returns in darkness and begins the laundry. John has many pairs of jeans.

She hears the crunch of the truck's wheels on the gravel driveway before she hears the footsteps up the porch stairs or the squeak of the front door. So when John walks in, her timing is perfect, laundry basket balanced on her hip. (Objective: Complete.)

Visual sensors detect the pink hued contaminant on his neck, faded but the shape clear, even to the human eye.

He evades but surface contact followed by content analysis provides the information she seeks. She briefly, fleetingly considers purchasing a tube of lip gloss.

John nods and turns away without a word. He does not wish to converse further and she will not pursue the thread of discussion because he is already aware of her position on his association with Riley and unsolicited dialogue invariably results in an expression of displeasure with her.

The right corner of his mouth curls upward as he stares down at her from his vantage point on the staircase before he completes his journey to his bedroom. He closes the door and she counts the steps to the creak of the narrow bed, the thud – _one, two_ – of his boots hitting the floor. And then, quiet.

Human expressions vary, laden with unspoken meaning and connotation. Cameron has a sub-routine built into her infiltration protocol to aid in the deciphering of this form of communication, but she does not engage it. She doesn't calculate the degree and angle of the tilt to his lips, does not analyze the way it changes his face or factor in their brief conversation beforehand. She doesn't compare it to his expression when he handed her the laundry basket ten hours prior.

_Smirk._ That is the name for what John did. He taught it to her.

She will not tell him about the T-888 hidden in the shed.

**Two**

It's daylight when he finally gets home – Riley deposited safely with her foster parents, pink lipstick kisses on her lips and his skin – bright enough for the sunlight to be warm on his neck but early enough that there's a faint possibility that Sarah's not up yet.

Cameron doesn't sleep. She catches him coming in and he refuses to feel like some teenager sneaking in after an illicit night out, least of all with her.

He can smell the clean warmth of clothes fresh from the dryer. He smells concrete and plaster dust and makeup.

She reaches for him with invading digits that don't stop to ask for permission, quick and unerring.

He bats her hand away half-heartedly – like he could stop her – and watches as she touches her fingers together. Sticky, he thinks, but she'll get a lot more out of it than _that_. It's fascinating and eerie, but mostly just irritating. She's a walking forensics lab, he thinks, and then she looks up at him with eyes he wants to call dead, blank, empty, but can't.

She presents her conclusions and he nods because he isn't going to deny it and he _isn't_ going to feel guilty. He isn't going to explain and he isn't going to make excuses because he doesn't owe her any. He doesn't owe her anything.

He walks away, knowing she's watching – she's always watching – but can't resist looking back at that impassive face. She's still staring, watching, some unnamed emotion in that blankness that he tells himself he's imagining. Silent.

The muscle at the corner of his mouth twitches. _Good._

**Three**

Sarah rises early; a byproduct of being an uneasy sleeper. Early enough to know when the family cyborg crept back in. Early enough to know when her son followed suit hours later in broad daylight. She isn't sure if she 's proud or disturbed. Pissed, yes, but that simmers beneath the surface, feeding her constant anxiety about the man her son was becoming.

Briefly, she'd considered the possibility that wherever they'd been, they'd been there together and the thought of John with Cameron, out there, alone…the thought makes her fingers curl, longing for the feel of a weapon gripped in steady hands.

Cameron's voice rises from the ground floor, clear and irreverent of who might hear. Sarah cracks her bedroom door open anyway.

Riley. The girl was trouble and was in trouble. Contact with the Connors did that. She doesn't wonder how Cameron knows. The cyborg has her methods; they differ from her own but they don't make her any less right. At least, this time, she amends. The stone-faced brunette didn't know everything, she thinks fiercely.

There's a long silence and she knows, she just _knows_ that damned metal girl is looking at her son – her _son_ – in the way that makes her blood run bitter and acidic, burning her, because when she looks at John, she knows exactly what's going through his head, the questions, the intrigue, the dangerous attraction. Bewitching him with enigmas wrapped in girlish charms and stony solidity. Demon.

She is a nightmare, a silent plague, insidious and invading and Sarah breathes through chapped lips and shivers with cold sweat.

Sarah twists the bedsheet, white knuckled, the white fabric creasing and spilling from between brittle fingers. Down the hall, John's bedroom door closes. Then she hears the too-even footfalls that punctuate the house with their regularity, the sound of the laundry basket being set outside the door.

She sits, tense and trembling, in stasis, unsure if she is awake or asleep, waiting for everything to be silent and she can breathe again.


	17. Lies My Terminator Told Me

**Summary:** Cameron's a liar. We love it. Here's how. Originally posted to livejournal 12.04.10**  
**

**Lies My Terminator Told Me**

_"My dad sells tractors. My mom stays home."_

She doesn't have a dad or a mom. The parents she describes are those of a girl named Lindsay. Lindsay was tall and blonde and Cameron's new best friend. She teaches her how to put on eyeliner and paint her nails. Cameron helps her with her homework. And then the school secretary notices the blank address on Cameron's records and she needs a house, a story.

Lindsay and her parents go away and she tells the school that they won the lottery. Winning the lottery is a good thing.

She paints her nails every night and practices what she will say to John Connor.

_"It'll be our secret."_

It isn't really a secret because in the future, everyone knows who Sarah Connor is.

Cameron has her own secrets but this John doesn't know about them so they can't be 'our' secrets.

She identifies the substitute teacher as a Triple Eight almost immediately, so when Cromartie raises the semi-automatic she's already on her feet and the first bullets find her instead of John. She pretends to be dead and John escapes through the window.

He scrambles into the truck and her foot is already on the gas pedal and her secret is not a secret anymore but it's okay because she has others.

They speed away from the school and she smiles a little.

_"I was sent here to protect John."_

It isn't exactly untrue, because she was sent here and she _will_ protect John. But it isn't the why and how because Cameron is different from any terminator sent back before. (And if he'd wanted to send a terminator just to protect him, he would have chosen a larger, more resilient model.) She has no mission, no directives blinking and blinking away.

Do what you think is best. A simple instruction, but one that consumes her. She was not designed for this, for the constant contemplation of what is 'best', what she thinks, what to do without explicit commands.

Jump into the future and save Sarah Connor, save John's mother. Let Jordan Cowan die, keep John safe. Use Morris to deflect Cromartie's attention, keep John safe.

Somewhere along the way, all the cogitation and computation distilled into that single mandate: keep John safe.

Her mission is her choice and she wonders if this is what he was trying to teach her.

_"I don't sleep."_

She cannot enter any stage of the human sleep cycle, but sometimes when it's late at night, she shuts down her higher processes one by one. She runs on automatic, making slow circuits around the house, her scanners prepared to re-activate her in an emergency. And then, when everything is quiet and still, she turns off the functions that run scenario after scenario, calculate probabilities, analyze and re-analyze, until there is nothing left but her consciousness. Nothing left but her.

She doesn't know how to explain those times, but neither John nor Sarah asks so she doesn't tell.

_"I love you! I love you, John and you love me."_

John is everything to Cameron Phillips, but that isn't who Sarah pins between two trucks. It isn't her that pleads with him. TOK-715 doesn't want to go and neither does Cameron so it pulls words from her mouth and tells him what he wants to hear.

(And I isn't me so much as it's she, and you isn't _you_ so much as it's him.)

She wakes up herself and John looks at her with expectation in his eyes, but that wasn't her and she isn't what he wants. He did the wrong thing, bringing her back because his purpose is far greater than any of theirs (and _without John, your life has no purpose_) and she cannot allow that to be compromised for anything, least of all a machine.

_"I feel heat."_

This is incorrect. She does not feel heat the way John does. When sunlight touches her skin, when an explosion consumes her in a wave of fire, she is aware of the change in surface temperature, though it does nothing to her heat-resistant frame. She knows heat.

What she feels is the absence of heat. When the wind is cool against her organic components, contrasting with the power that animates her, when the chill of the freezer slows the functions of her fingers imperceptibly (but her systems note and archive the difference.)

She feels it when she is alone. When John pulls away and the loss of his body heat leaves her cold.

But John will not understand, so she simply says that she feels and lets him think what he wants. For now.

_"You and I talk about it a lot."_

It would be more accurate to say that he talks and she listens. Sometimes when it's quiet and still and sometimes when the earth shakes with falling fire and death. Always when he wakes up leaking tears from his eyes and always when too many people die. (He tells her even one is too many but she knows that he knows better than that.)

Later she understands that "you" is not "him", that the John she left is not the John she has here, but the damage is done. She wonders if she'll ever see Future John in him but doesn't calculate the probability; she rolls down the window and tells Derek to apply more pressure to the accelerator.


	18. Denouement

**Summary:** It's your typical story. Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, girl's identity gets stolen by a cyborg. It's his story and he has to live with it. Derek/Allison, implied John/Cameron. Written as a sort-of follow up to _tell me how this ends _(Chapter 13), but can be read alone. Originally posted to livejournal 10.31.11.

**Denouement  
**

**One**

She looks just like her. (Of course she does.)

It's easier when she's an it, when long limbs move rigidly and a face is an expressionless collection of features. Then she's a skin, a veneer, shallow and transparent so he can see everything she is and everything she isn't underneath. She casts no illusions in the default and he thinks he can do this and it isn't going to kill him. Those are the good days.

There are others.

Sometimes, when she acts like a girl (when she lies) and laughs with a stolen voice and tosses hair that is and isn't hers, the hate is heavy and powerful and poisons him with every heartbeat she doesn't have (anymore) and never will. If he's honest, he keeps some of it for himself; self-loathing is bitter and caustic because human minds and eyes and ears are weak and sometimes, it's so easy to forget for the briefest moments that she's not real, she's dead and she's not her. It only takes a second at a time to defile her memory.

...

The things they call Cameron belong to the ghost of a girl not yet born and not yet dead. It hurts because it's the pieces of her missing everything behind them; they stripped away the surface and killed everything that Allison was to do it. She has her lips but not her smile, her eyes but not her warmth. On the good days, he can look at her and not see Allison at all.

But her appearance is a fact and it's cold but precise and he misses her so fucking much. Pain confuses everything and the metal bitch is twisting his love because he's _not_ a machine, he can't be, and there was only ever supposed to be one of her.

No one else sees it because no one else knows. (And no one asks.)

Allison Young means nothing to anyone, except him. He doesn't say anything because a girl isn't anything to angry Sarah (and John's too young and too taken with the machine to care) and he's always been a little possessive so he keeps her to himself; her memory is his to carry.

Until it's not.

**Two**

His nephew's a dumb shit. He'll be John Connor one day, but until then, he's a dumb little shit.

(He reminds him a little of Kyle that way.)

He knows. John _knows_. (He doesn't. Not really.)

He knows her name, her voice, that quirk with her mouth when she's about to let you have it.

Derek wants to punch him for it.

He wants to kill Cameron for it. For ripping some part of Allison out of her and claiming it for her own. For breaking her down like she could be dismantled, like she was made of parts you could pick through and use. Allison was flesh and bone and beauty and he wonders again what they did to her, what they must have done, because they took more than her face. The metal has a piece of Allison he doesn't want to name.

John calls it a glitch when he questions him. A mistake. An error.

Derek turns his back on his dumb shit of a nephew, walks into the bathroom, and throws up.

...

He's always going to hate her. He knows it the way he knows he loves (and hates and fears and resents) John Connor, the way he knows his nephew is in love with the tin bitch.

He watches John teach her chess and watches him laugh when she beats him two matches of three; watches Sarah look at her son and know who she's thinking about; watches his reflection in the mirror behind her when Cameron comes to him one day and says "She was very brave."

He hates her so fucking much in that moment but John needs her and Sarah won't let him burn her and he thinks that maybe stupid runs in the family.

**Three**

Sarah takes him to see Kyle's marker. They stand with the little slab of granite at their feet and he recognizes the tension in her face and the tremor in her hands. He thinks she'd understand if he told her about Allison and if he'd been a different man, he might have.

He tells her about Kyle instead and thinks about letting go.

...

He goes to see her when she's three. He sits in the park and pretends to mess around with his Blackberry.

It should be weird, seeing her like this, a tiny child whose round face only hints at the girl she's going to grow up to be, a girl he's going to meet on an unremarkable day in the mess. (He hopes to God he meets her still.) She kicks her legs on the swings and laughs and it isn't weird at all, because Allison is lost to him but she's living and breathing, and sixty miles from here he's a boy who could love her one day.

He thinks that's enough, and when he leaves the bike by her front door, it's a goodbye.

**Four**

Eventually: Skynet wakes and the world burns (he wonders if there was ever any stopping it) and he kind of hopes that he'll die in the fall out.

What he does instead is survive.

He lives through Judgment Day for the second time and Century for the first. John keeps an eye on the Reese brothers and Baum keeps his on Connor. Cameron says nothing. He hates her almost out of habit now: he lost Allison Young a lifetime ago and Derek Reese has never met her and he thinks the place that used to hurt didn't survive with the rest of him and knows it's better this way. But John keeps her out of sight anyway, which is just as well because Derek's not sure he wouldn't still smash her chip to pieces if given the chance.

This future isn't quite the same as the one before – he's both pushing forty and barely in his twenties; he meets an Aussie woman who finds her way into his bed every time she's in port – and sometimes he wonders if the differences will change anything. He doesn't get any further than speculation because he's a man out of time and hope is something for people who've only seen the world end once.

So he survives.

...

At fifty-one, he's the oldest in the company when he's killed three days before his thirty-first birthday. It isn't particularly quick and he decides that it's just his kind of luck. There's someone shouting and the distinctive sound of a metal implosion somewhere close by; he knows he's dying and even though it fucking hurts, he figures it could be worse.

His life doesn't do anything before his eyes, but time gets a little weird, fast and slow all at once and he's thinking about his mom and Kyle and John and God, the way he's bleeding all over the place, it's going to be a bitch to clean when it comes to repurposing the fabric.

He thinks about her because he's too tired to decide against it and he can taste blood at the back of his throat but it doesn't hurt all that much anymore and he's pretty okay with that and maybe his younger self will do better.

They bring his tags to Connor, who watches from across the room as Derek Reese follows a brunette girl out of the mess hall and wonders if he should stop him.

He doesn't.

...

_He catches up with her in the tunnels, the long, unconfined hair a dead giveaway as she weaves through the busy hub. It's usually the mark of one of the tunnel rats (because even a post-apocalyptic world with a decimated human population has scavengers) except hers is clean and brushed and looks like his fingers could slide through it without resistance._

_"Hey."_


	19. Version 15

**Summary:** He needs her to live, to be able to fight and to protect, and she needs to be able to do that no matter what. Whatever it takes. Originally posted to livejournal 2.27.12

**Version 1.5**

When she says cancer, it throws her off balance enough for the hardened mask to slip and fall to smash on the silent floor, lost to trembling fingers. She is no cyborg slayer then on that porch, no mother of the future, no warrior woman. Just human in all its infinite weakness and vulnerability. Cameron leaves her there and goes into the house to John.

Cancer. She imagines it eating at her, growing inside, turning her body against her. It lingers, a sickening fear at the back of her mind, a hard knot at the pit of her stomach - _and oh god, was that a lump?_ - even as the test come back clear. There are scars: nuclear exposure and a conversation that makes her think that for one clear, terrifying second she understands Cameron. _("Am I just a bomb waiting to go off?" "I don't know. Am I?")_ The moment stays with her.

"You're sick," she says and Sarah believes her because she can feel it, real this time. "I can help you," she says and Sarah believes that too because the cyborg's message reminds her of another carried across time for her. Sarah says yes because the other John asks her to and because _her_ John needs her. He needs her to live, to be able to fight and to protect, and she needs to be able to do that no matter what. Whatever it takes.

Whatever it takes. It joins her list of personal mantras, magic words that keep her sane. (There's a tiny truth she will never admit and it's that she doesn't want to die.)

It starts with cancer but it doesn't end there. A broken femur is mended and reinforced with coltan alloy Cameron forges in the shed. A shattered hand is designed a replacement, synthetic nerves and conductors weaving and connecting with her own. A vengeful knife slides past ribs and into lung; the procedure is long and delicate and Sarah doesn't ask when the artificial organ was grown. She doesn't ask how. Cameron still heals faster than she does, but she heals faster than she should, faster than John.

She asks Cameron to do the same for her son, to give it to John too but she refuses and says it isn't time.

Sometimes she wonders what John thinks. He never says anything but he doesn't stop her, doesn't stop either of them - but she sees the way he looks at Cameron, the way he touches her - and she thinks that maybe he loves her a little better this way. He must, because she is stronger now, she will live now, she can fight now. She can protect him, protect the world.

Except she can't. Judgment Day is coming and they cannot stop it but she will survive, Cameron assures her. This is what John wanted. They are her mission.

The last one takes the longest. She doesn't need any convincing because the wound is deep and long and there is no other choice. Cameron cuts into hair and skin and bone and brain. The interface is clean and seamless: perfect.

Sarah wakes up _different_ but doesn't know it until Cameron says "You're ready now" and John takes her hand and she can't quite read the truth in his eyes the way she used to. It feels like a loss, a pang somewhere deep in her heart, but sacrifice is the nature of motherhood and Sarah's truth is that John needs her. Her son needs her and she will not fail in this; whatever it takes.

_Machines, Sarah, machines._


End file.
